<div>
<p>Work stoppages have had a recent upsurge in the American
educational sector. Since 2018, teachers across the country have participated
in record-breaking labor strikes using innovative communication technologies to
skirt more traditional, offline organizing spaces in order to keep their
organizing communication private and/or secret. This dissertation presents two
studies that address the organizing communication done behind virtual closed
doors as well as the public-facing strike communication intentionally meant for
relevant stakeholders. In addition to this distinction between intended
audiences, I also consider how differing legal contexts may influence the
communication possibilities for teachers participating in a strike.
Specifically, right-to-work (RTW) laws serve as a legal backdrop in both
studies to examine how state-level policy helps or hinders workers organizing
in the public sector by comparing one strike in a RTW state to another strike
in a state without RTW laws.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The internal organizing communication was done in private
Facebook groups for both teachers groups. I used the two spectra from the
Collective Action Space theoretical framework (Flanagin et al., 2006) to plot
the internal organizing communication according to the posts and comments in
each Facebook group. The RTW teachers’ internal organizing communication is
near the personal and institutional ends of the mode of interaction and mode of
engagement spectra, respectively. This placement indicates that the RTW
teachers valued and utilized deliberative engagement in their channels of
communication while also exhibiting communication patterns more indicative of
top-down, hierarchical power structures. The unionized teachers’ internal
organizing communication is closer to the impersonal and entrepreneurial ends
of the mode of interaction and mode of engagement spectra, respectively. This
combination of placements on the two spectra indicate that the unionized
teachers valued equitable channels of communication while devaluing
conversation and back-and-forth deliberation.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The external organizing communication was observed and
analyzed on Twitter. Building largely on network agenda-building theory (Guo
& McCombs, 2011a, 2011b; Guo, 2012), I employed semantic saturation as a
class of semantic network analyses to compare and contrast the public
communication about each strike from each legal context. These techniques
involve capturing the language structure used by various group to discuss the
strike and analyzing and comparing how much of one group’s messaging ends up in
another group’s messaging (Wiemer & Scacco, 2018; Wiemer et al., 2021). In
general, the teachers in the RTW legal context were more effective at getting
their messaging into the local press’s reporting about the strike. The teachers
in both contexts also appeared to be communicating toward different audiences
when specifically talking about one of their strike demands and that difference
was also reflected in the local press’s reporting on each strike.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Overall, this dissertation extends collective action and
media effects theories by analyzing two strike events in two very different
legal contexts that both used the same communication technology to organize
their respective strikes. The findings presented here have important
implications for organizing communication, interest group politics, and the
role of local news media in labor actions.</p></div>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/16587323 |
| Date | 29 October 2021 |
| Creators | Eric C. Wiemer (11408111) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/The_Semantic_Saturation_of_Labor_Strikes_Internal_Organizing_Processes_and_the_Political_Influence_of_Public_School_Teachers_on_Strike/16587323 |
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